“a good wine needs no bush” — shakespeare

For those you who are in the ad business, you should might know this quote. Maybe not who said it (Shakespeare) but why he said it and in what context. Those who know what I mean/quote by this, we share a similar passion, and it’s this passion that is fueling the social advertising/networks of today. For those of you who don’t, I’ll need to spell it out… but I won’t, it probably won’t help. so…

“you don’t call yourself a genius unless you are a fool”— Hiroyuki
If you think that social media is only effecting music and movie studios, your either too old or to long in this business. Change management was a buzzword of the 90’s and most of you including me laughed and profited by it. With no regard to the change within our own business… well you are probably to late. Just like the dinosaurs of the music and film biz, it is the agile and the thought leaders of companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft that will take your business away. Laughing… don’t… it’s real and it’s happening faster than you think, or change.

As a product of 70’s and 80’s advertising I too fell victim of watching ads. Kids of the 90’s and 00’s have choices and they generally choose not to watch commercials. WHY, for a few reasons:

They don’t engage, they are over focused grouped or over produced.

They just don’t have time or patience, (If you have kids you know they rarely have free time and when they do they don’t spend it with advertising).

Probably the most important… it is not relevant! seemingly relevant ads that attempt to target their demographic are perceived as fake, ads that don’t, are ignored, the occasional ad that they relate to are ones that feel as if they are communicating with them providing important social content or entertaining content that they or their friends would be part of. Most importantly it is “CONTENT” yes selling by providing a service of relevant content.

What’s it’s not, is a new social network to join to be part of your favorite soft drink, it’s not a forced viral campaign on youtube to trick them into thinking your cool, and it is certainly not having a MySpace of FaceBook page, that kinda stuff just smells bad.

You’re all bright, it’s time to stop resting on past successes and really think, just fucking think! get out of the office, get online, join a community, go to a meetup, but do it for a reason that has nothing to do with advertising, and really be a part of it. This is what kids are doing, it ain’t what advertising companied are doing now.

I want to leave with one final thought, I have a 13 year old daughter, she does not watch a lot of TV, a few hour per week, and only certain shows, she USED to occasionally tell me of a product she learned about on TV (yes a commercial). Now she either tivo’s past the commercials or jumps channels, I recently asked her why she skips commercials, her response; “they are just trying to sell me something, and I’m not into it, they get in the way of my shows”…

oh one more, yesterday I clicked on a story that seemed like something that would interest me, it was a video on Yahoo’s! site, I sat thru the commercial pre-roll then the spot started, 5 seconds into the story they cut to another commercial, I cut also. Times have changed, I am willing to pay a certain price but it aint’t the price we paid on TV in the past, and I’m sorry to say the commercial content is not compelling to watch, I have to agree with my daughter, I’m not into it…

ok, one more thought. The buyers of tomorrow are not surfing the web, they are not watching TV and they are not reading Newspapers or Magazine… what’s your next move. It had better be good.

We are certainly not in Kansas anymore.

“a good wine needs no bush” = a good product doesn’t need to be forced